Robert E. Poli, Leader of Pivotal Strike by Air Traffic Controllers, Is Dead at 78

Robert E. Poli, who led the tumultuous 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike, which prompted President Ronald Reagan to dismiss 11,500 controllers and is viewed as a pivotal moment in the decline of organized labor, died on Sept. 15 at his home in Meridian, Idaho. He was 78.

His son, Rob, said the cause was kidney and liver failure.

On Aug. 3, 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, which represented most of the nation’s 17,000 controllers, went on strike seeking higher wages, a shorter workweek, improved pensions, better equipment and other benefits. Even in an era when labor unions were powerful, it was an audacious move.

Air traffic controllers played an essential role in keeping American skies and runways safe. Stopping work would clearly be disruptive. It would also be illegal. While private-sector unions often went on strike as a bargaining tool, unions of federal employees were prohibited from striking.

The law was clear, but that did not stop the controllers.

“Oh, certainly, I’ll go to jail,” Mr. Poli (pronounced POH-lye) said the day the strike began. “I’ll carry this through to the fullest.”

As air travel increased in the 1960s and 1970s, so did frustration among controllers over pay and working conditions. They organized work slowdowns and “sickouts” in protest, winning only modest concessions from the Federal Aviation Administration.

By the late ’70s, momentum to strike was growing, but many controllers were concerned that their president, John Leyden, lacked the conviction to go through with the move. Mr. Poli, who had become vice president of the union in 1972, was traveling around the country and meeting with controllers to measure their mood and gather support.

In 1980, Mr. Leyden and Mr. Poli offered their resignations. Yet the union’s board refused to accept Mr. Poli’s — a move many believed was planned — and Mr. Poli became president.

“It was a difference in philosophy,” Mr. Poli said in 1981. “I guess I’m more a militant than he is.”

The union was on the brink of striking in June 1981 when Mr. Poli reached a last-minute agreement with Drew Lewis, the secretary of transportation, that raised salaries and provided other benefits. The agreement was authorized by President Reagan.

Mr. Poli called the terms fair, but they were far from what the controllers had demanded. The union’s membership voted to reject the agreement.

By early August a strike seemed imminent, putting Mr. Reagan, who had been in office less than seven months, in a difficult spot. During the 1980 campaign, as part of his effort to win union support, Mr. Reagan had met with Mr. Poli. Not long after, the controllers, frustrated with the F.A.A. under President Jimmy Carter, made a surprise move: They endorsed Mr. Reagan.

“You can rest assured,” Mr. Reagan, a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, wrote to Mr. Poli just days before the election, “that if I am elected president, I will take whatever steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and work days so that they are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety.”

The next year, on the day of the strike, President Reagan gave the controllers an ultimatum: Return to work within 48 hours or be fired. The controllers doubted his resolve.

“They kind of hung their hats on that letter,” Rob Poli said in an interview on Friday. “They said, ‘O.K., he’s just playing politics, but we know he’s with us.’ ”

On Aug. 5, the president fired the 11,500 controllers who did not follow his order to return to work that day.

The government brought in military controllers as a stopgap measure, retained those controllers who had chosen not to strike, and hired new workers. Air traffic was slowed and flights were delayed, but the firings led to no major disasters. An association of pilots said the skies were safer than they had been before the strike. In December, the president lifted a ban on allowing controllers to work in other jobs for the federal government, but he maintained the ban on their returning as controllers.

Mr. Poli called that decision “a cruel hoax,” saying there were few federal jobs to be had. The union was devastated. Mr. Poli resigned in the final days of December.

The episode burnished Mr. Reagan’s reputation among conservatives. Although the president had supported the controllers’ right to bargain and even made concessions — and although the controllers were in clear violation of the law — the image that his supporters cultivated for him was of a tough executive standing firm. In White House communications, the president’s aides noted that his handling of the strike made him appear strong internationally, impressing Soviet leaders.

“This powerful narrative erased contradictory nuances from the public memory so effectively because it seemed to connect and explain two defining developments of the Reagan era: the end of the Cold War and the rise of conservatism,” Joseph A. McCartin, a professor of history at Georgetown University, wrote in a book, “Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America,” published in 2011.

Robert Edmund Poli was born on Feb. 27, 1936, in Pittsburgh, where union culture was prominent. His parents, Peter and Cora, owned a luncheonette.

After graduating from high school, Mr. Poli spent four years in the Air Force, where he learned to be an air traffic controller. By the early 1960s he was working as a controller at the Pittsburgh airport. He later moved to the control center in Cleveland, one of the busiest in the nation.

After resigning from the union, Mr. Poli sold real estate, managed BMW dealerships and held other jobs. At one point he worked as a labor negotiator for General Electric.

In addition to his son, his survivors include his wife, Marijess; a daughter, Laura Cholet; and four grandchildren. Two previous marriages ended in divorce.

Mr. Poli never did go to jail during the strike, but in the years after, he received harsh criticism and even death threats, with many controllers blaming him for losing their jobs. He had little contact with fellow former controllers. When President Bill Clinton lifted the ban on the rehiring of controllers in 1993, Mr. Poli decided not to reapply for his former job and urged some of his old friends to make the same choice. “He would not talk to me,” Mr. McCartin, the author of “Collision Course,” said in an interview. “He’s the one person who really did not want to talk.”

“I think he had a terrible time living with this,” Mr. McCartin said.

Rob Poli said that he sometimes challenged his father on the wisdom of the strike, but that his father would not yield, citing the vote of the union members.

“That wasn’t his intention when he ran for president, that ‘I’m going to become president and I’m going to take this union out on strike,’ ” Rob Poli said. “I think the difference was, he wasn’t afraid of being the person out there and doing it.”

“I’m very proud of him,” he added. “He was a good guy just trying to do what he thought was right and kind of got boxed into a corner. He used to always say, ‘Oh, Robbie, if that had worked out, it would have been the greatest thing in the world.’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: Robert E. Poli, Leader of Pivotal Strike by Air Traffic Controllers, Is Dead at 78. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe